Combat Updates – Update 51 PTS

Hi All. Below is a message from the combat team, touching on some of the feedback we've seen over the last two weeks of PTS.

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Greetings! This week the combat team has an update relating to some upcoming changes we’ll be pushing to the PTS for Update 51. Before we get into the juicy details, we’ll quickly talk about general sentiments we’ve seen that have led us here, as these changes are in direct response to your PTS feedback and were not originally planned.

Firstly, we’ve seen a good deal of feedback on the state of PvP regarding both Dragonknight and Werewolf, and their prevalence and often dominance in that space. Part of this is inevitable by nature of them getting their refreshes before others, but this has clearly been a frustrating experience that has diminished much of the benefits that Class Mastery has introduced (at least in the PvP setting). While we did make a targeted set of changes on the PTS that made sustaining more challenging for Werewolves, we did not make a larger effort to reel in some of the spikiest bits (namely their burst and sustain) of the Dragonknight kit – which we’ve heard loud and clear that this is a priority issue you’d like us to address (and you will see some of that below).

Additionally, on the PvE side of things, we’re happy to see many of you enjoying the Class Mastery system – it’s clearly been a healthy shake up for the meta in that part of the game and we’re still seeing data rapidly change every few weeks, meaning things have far from settled. This is originally why we had combat balance adjustments very light. There’s still much to discover and optimize, and we didn’t want to disrupt that so soon after the experience came out; however, similarly to PvP, we’ve seen a lot of push back about classes that don’t win as much as you’d like and concern that they will feel left in the dust for a considerable amount of time. With the short turn-around we have, it isn’t possible to rectify every issue or make large changes, but we have devised a handful of smaller, numbers-based adjustments that will hopefully help out the classes that feel a little more is needed to get them up to speed with the others.

Coming in next week’s PTS patch, you can expect the following adjustments:

• Dragonknight
  • Core of Flame will restore 12% missing resources, down from 15%. Heart of Flame’s healing has also been reduced by 20%.
  • Landslide now generates slightly quicker, stacks slightly higher (12 stacks), and decays slower, reducing how “swingy” the class can feel at times.
  • Earthspike Mantle’s flat damage done bonus is now damage done to monsters, to offset the buff to Landslide in PvP.
  • Seething Fury (Molten Whip’s buff) is now halved in PvP, reducing how deadly their burst combos can be.
  • Power Lash (augment to Flame Lash) deals less outright damage, but now offers a minor bonus to damage done to monsters after generating charges, to also reduce their burst potential.

• Templar
  • Balanced Warrior’s math formula is now more complicated, but more rewarding. It has no cap and rewards the slotting of Templar skills in addition to scaling with Armor, helping it be better for Templars, while staying around the same power for non-Templars.
  • Judgment’s Brand’s damage bonus has been increased slightly (1600 bonus damage, up from 1400, still halved in PvP).
  • Aetheric Lancer’s area effect now generates on you when it activates, provided you are not moving (rather than spawning randomly around you.) This rewards the Templar who holds their ground with relentless damage.

• Nightblade
  • Strife now grants a unique damage bonus that increases your damage done by 1% for every 10% Health you have, while it is active.
    • We’ve also seen pushback on the cost increases, which we are still evaluating further adjustments to. We’re very cautious to reintroduce the skill to the same degree of power it was in the Summerset era.

• Necromancer
  • Nothing Wasted now decays less aggressively (loses 2 stacks instead of 3) but decays every 12 seconds of not generating a corpse, rather than 15 seconds. This is mostly a cadence tweak to help reduce how punishing it feels in some encounters.
  • Pummeling Goliath’s bash attack will now have a 1-second cooldown, but deals ~73% more damage on hit, helping smooth out how strong the Ultimate is. This is mainly aimed at correcting the need to double bash weave, which we know isn’t particularly fun. Bash weaving is hard enough! This will nerf some of the ceiling potential, which we’re also okay with based on their logs.
  • Frozen Colossus will deal more damage (12.5% more) and cost less (150 Ultimate) for the update, while we work on long-term changes. We will ultimately revert these in a future update for a more PvE-targeted approach, as the Ultimate isn’t weak in PvP as it stands now.

• Warden: We’re currently still amid the refresh, which has made improvements here very difficult. These are not indicative of where we’d like the Warden to end up, but change here is much more restrictive for that reason.
  • Fetcher Infection will deal slightly more damage (75%, up from 60%) every other cast
  • Arctic Blast will deal more damage over time (~20% per tick)

• Miscellaneous
  • Draugrkin’s Healing reduction now is halved in PvP, since its bonus is halved, so it’s less punishing to use after being reduced. We’ve also updated the 2- and 4-piece bonus to Weapon and Spell Damage, instead of those stinky other stat lines.
    • We’re still interested in updating stat lines for old sets like you saw us work on in Update 49, and will do so as time and bandwidth allow for smaller efforts such as this.

  • Ice Comet does more damage over time (~21%), helping it climb up the mountain of distance between it and Shooting Star. It also now snares enemies whenever it deals any damage, rather than only the initial hit, helping keep enemies inside its lingering area.
  • The usual bug fixes and tooltip updates!

While we will continue to monitor feedback based on these adjustments, as Nick outlined in his letter, we want to focus on quality experiences over calendar dates so these efforts may take us longer than before. That being said, we’ll continue to take note of the sentiments and desires for future updates, and continue to search for ways to take smaller, more targeted approaches like this as the march of time continues. Thank you all for your support and patience – we know it isn’t always easy! See you in Tamriel – until then, safe journeys!